If you are a small business owner who is looking to expand your reach or boost your presence online, social media management might just be the right fit for you. But it isn’t going to happen overnight. You will need to commit yourself to social media management and implement smart strategies in order to make sure your efforts succeed.
To get started with social media management, follow these five simple steps. Step one is to identify your company’s goals. Each plan should begin with a goal, and this goal should be specific and measurable. When developing your plan, make sure it includes specific goals along with quantitative measures so you can analyze your progress over time. Your goals will serve as a guide to help you develop and manage your social media management strategy.
Step two is to set up your social media management tools. Now that you have goals, you need to specify how you plan to measure your success. If you want to optimize your branding efforts, for example, you might decide to track your click-through rate on each page of your website and divide that number by the number of pages to determine your ROI. Or if you’re looking for an easy way to determine your return on investment for each campaign, you could calculate the cost per click and divide that number by the number of campaigns run. Your social media management tools should allow you to customize these reports for your specific goals and measure your success.
Step three is to use the metrics to measure your progress. Your social media manager should provide you with useful metrics so you can analyze your performance. Metrics should provide information like: engagement level, average engagement per day, number of new contacts created each day, and the average time spent on each channel per day. You want to be able to easily compare your performance to your goals and the strategies you are using to build your brand. A social media manager that offers simple, clear and detailed metrics makes managing your social media a much easier, faster and more effective process. By breaking down large tasks into their simplest form, you will be able to evaluate your efforts against your goals and ensure that your marketing strategy is effective.
Step four is to engage your influencers. While the influencer is certainly your biggest fan, they are not your only one when it comes to engaging your social media audience. Social media audiences are not only interested in what you have to say, but they are also interested in the ways you say it. Engaging your influencers allows you to put their voice on the line, allowing them to call the shots on how their brand will be perceived. When you manage influencers well, you can easily take your brand and your audience to unprecedented heights.
Step five is to create a social media strategy. If you do not outline a plan, you are leaving yourself wide open. A social media strategy should provide a blueprint for your organization, showing you how you will grow your audience, how you will engage with your audience and how you will measure your success. A solid social media marketing plan will include metrics, goals and objectives, as well as timelines for achieving those goals and objectives.
Step six is to monitor your progress. Metrics provided by your metrics can help you measure how successful your social media strategies are, which gives you an idea of what to continue to focus on. Measuring your progress can also help you identify areas that you need to continue to focus on. A social media management system that offers detailed information about the progress of your campaigns, including data and analysis about which social channels are performing best, is an efficient social media management platform. You can monitor the performance of your current strategies, which helps you stay on target with your business goals.
Finally, step seven is to execute your strategies. Once you have implemented your plans and your media campaigns, it is important to execute your plans as often as possible. The execution of a social media management system requires you to manage social media accounts on a daily basis. Using a social media management system that automates the management of your media content creation, publishing and monitoring campaigns allows you to spend your time focusing on building your business rather than on managing social media accounts.